You said 'You think we can only do what we have to do, become active, if we are sometimes in a practical sense separate?'
I said 'I have not said that!'
You said 'Of course you have not said that!'
I thought — And then from time to time we can have again those Shakespearian recognition scenes, miracle scenes; and at least will not have become fused, without energy, like ordinary ghastly married couples.
Sometime before Christmas I paid my annual visit to my father and my mother. I went on my own. I said to you 'Goodbye!' Then
- 'Oh no, you never much liked opera.*
You said 'Meet you behind the gasworks — or whatever is that strange place that you say.'
I found my mother, upright, in her seat by the window. I thought
— This is how she will appear, having been dug out of the ashes in a thousand years. She said 'I'm sorry I was horrible the last time you were here.' I said 'Oh that's all right.' Then — 'I thought psychoanalysts were usually awful to their children.' She said 'Yes, why is that, do you think?' I said 'I suppose it's to try to help them get away.' She said 'How kind!' I said 'Yes, but it only works if it's conscious, and then you can't really do it, can you?'
When I found my father in his study he seemed old, as if ash were already falling from factory chimneys on to snow. He said 'What are you doing for Christmas? Or don't you have Christmas any more?'
I thought I might say — Oh no, we eat babies.
I said 'I always find it frightening, Christmas: all those babies being killed: and such celebration!'
My father said 'I suppose it's like the production of any new species.'
I thought — Well, what I have learned from you is some sort of irony, my father and my mother: thank you: let it stand me in good stead.
I went to see Mullen at Cambridge. He had not been in touch with me since the time I had been with Caroline in the London pub. He was in the same building in the college in which he had been an undergraduate years ago. I said 'You never got in touch with me so I thought I'd get in touch with you: but what inferences you will draw from this!'
He said 'What news have you of our friend Kapitsa?'
I said 'I have no news of Kapitsa. I was going to ask you.'
Mullen was a long thin figure who seemed to be bent into his
chair in the shape of a hook. He said 'Sherry?' Then — 'Your wife was a Party member, was she not?'
I said 'That was a long time ago.'
He said 'And then she was a nurse with the Nationalists in Spain.'
I said 'The things we have to do, in our different ways!'
He said 'You asked me a question a long time ago.'
'What was that?'
He said 'What is the essential difference between Communism and Nazism — when they both seem so similar in their ruthlessness and in their manipulation of power.'
'And what did you say?'
'What I say now is that Communists, for all their brutalities and stupidities, are on the side of life; whereas Nazis — as they say so explicitly themselves — are on the side of death.'
I said 'What about these people in Moscow now who say they deserve to die?'
He said 'But you know the answer to that.' Then — 'Why shouldn't they want to die?'
When Mullen smiled he had large yellow teeth which seemed to have been stained perhaps by drops running down from his eyes.
I said 'What you really want to know is, whether anyone is getting anywhere here with this business of radioactivity.'
He said'Yes.'
I said 'We're getting nowhere. Kapitsa might be getting somewhere. There are stories that they might be getting near to a breakthrough in Germany. That was what I wanted to talk to you about.'
Mullen said 'Why do you say that Kapitsa might be getting somewhere?'
I said 'Because he has the imagination, he would want to succeed, he would not want everything he cared about to be destroyed.'
Mullen spread himself in his chair as if he were trying to make himself more anonymous, like a linen cover. He said 'You agree that it would be a disaster if such technology was developed by the Nazis.'
I said 'How far has Kapitsa got? Don't you know?'
He said 'Would you tell me if you got anywhere here in the future?'
I said 'I'd say what I thought was right so long as I'd made no undertaking not to. I wouldn't do anything explicitly for a foreign power.'
He said 'You wouldn't tell the Nazis?'
I said 'Of course I wouldn't tell the Nazis!'
He said 'And you wouldn't tell me.'
I said 'Oh I'm just going through the motions of what I think is right! What does it matter if you have nothing to tell me about Kapitsa?'
For Christmas that year we went, you and I, to Holy Island, or Lindisfarne — a piece of land off the Northumberland coast stuck out like an antenna into the sea. I had wanted to go there because it was one of the places to which, centuries ago, people had been blown across the dark sea in little boats; they had landed, had put down roots; they had built monasteries and places of light: where had they come from, where were they going? We stayed in a boarding-house, you and I. We were the only guests. I thought — Here we are, on these mudflats: there is plenty of room at the inn.
There was a Nativity scene set up in the village church: Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and the child were all looking at an empty space on the ground just outside the framework of the setting. I thought — It is as if there had been some sort of nest there: the bird has flown.
You said 'I used to think how important it was that there should be a reconciliation between Christians and Jews.'
I said 'And don't you think that now?'
You said 'I think we're always parts of the same thing.'
There was a walk across fields to huge sand-dunes and a beach to which it seemed only birds ever came; they hurried on wet sand with their reflections underneath them. I thought — It might be they who carry strange seeds in their crops; from these seeds, when they drop them, a new race of men might grow. Where would they have come from, where would they be going? There was a hard rain driving in from the sea. Donald Hodge had gone for Christmas across the sea to Germany, then Denmark. He had gone there in response to rumours about what might be about to be revealed of the secrets of the atom. Perhaps was it from this that a strange new race of men might spring — as it was supposed to have done that first Christmas years ago, but not quite: the seeds for 2000 years having remained dormant as if under snow. I said to you 'I don't think it has ever really been seen, the point of that story.' You said 'The point is, what is a story?' I said 'Perhaps something the effect of which, in spite of its not being seen, grows.'
At night it was so cold that it was as if spray were breaking over
us where we clung to each other on our rock, and all the devils that had been sent out into the world were rushing back to us for warmth, for protection.
It was just after Christmas that I got a telegram from Donald Hodge asking me to return home urgently; he said something of great importance had occurred of which he could not tell me in a telegram. I thought — Oh indeed, some parturition? Some projected slaughter of innocents? Then — What we need, perhaps, is a story about stories.
— Once upon a time, children, when it came to be necessary to eat the fruit of that second tree of Life -
We left Holy Island, you and I, and went back to the laboratory. There we learned the story of what had actually happened across the sea that Christmas. I thought — It would be a technical problem, certainly, to put it into words.
Once upon a time, children, there were two scientists who were working in a laboratory in Berlin. One was called Otto Hahn and the other Lise Meitner. One was a chemist and one was a physicist; one was a man and one was a woman; one was a Gentile and the other was a Jew. They had been working together for many years to try to understand the secrets of the atom. Then in the summer of 1938 their partnership was broken up: Lise Meitner, an Austrian Jew, was forced to leave Austria/Germany: she went to Sweden to be an exile in a foreign country. Otto Hahn stayed behind in the laboratory in Berlin; he carried on with the experiments. He had been the one to set up and tabulate the experiments; Lise Meitner had been the one to try to understand what they might mean. Otto Hahn found that now more than ever the experiments made no sense: the nuclei of uranium seemed to be being transmuted into the nuclei of a much lighter element; and what understanding was there for this? There had, of course, been the theory that the nucleus of an atom might be held together like a drop of water; but although it could conceivably be imagined that a drop of water might split into two almost equal parts, there was still no mathematics to explain how this might occur; and what could be said scientifically about what could not be represented by mathematics? Otto Hahn wrote to Lise Meitner to tell her of the results of his experiments: she was, after all, the one who might be able to explain them, even if in exile. This was Christmas, 1938. Then Lise Meitner was joined in Sweden by her nephew, Otto Frisch: Otto Frisch was also an exile; also a physicist and a Jew. On Christmas Eve Lise Meitner